Johnothan Beans’es ex-wife said it was done by machinery, and she said, for I asked her the first thing, “that there wasn’t no funeral, that there was jest such a crowd every day.” I didn’t believe her, but I was too beat out to contend. And glad enough was I, to stretch my weary limbs in a rockin’ chair. J. Beans’es ex-wife said she would fetch me up a cup of tea, and my supper to me. She haint forgot the past.
She told me when she left me that night, to be dreadful careful about the gass, and not blow it out; she told me jest how it was done, and I’ll bet Mrs. Aster herself couldn’t do it any neater, for I thought of Josiah, and the thought of that man nerved me to do it right, so as not to die and leave him a gass widower, and a lonely man.
When I waked up in the mornin’ such a noise as I heard. Why, I have thought sometimes when I was sleepy, that our old rooster “Hail the Day” makes an awful sight of noise. But good land! if all the roosters in the United States and Boston, had roosted right under my window, they couldn’t have begun with it. My first thought as I leaped out of bed was, “Jonesville is afire.” Then recollectin’ myself, I grew calmer, and thought mebby Miss Aster had got breakfast ready, and was a hollerin’ to me. And growin’ still more composed, I gin up that the tramplin’ and hollerin’ was doun in the street. As I dressed me, I lay out my work for the day; thinks’es I, “Betsey Bobbet will be so took up with her mission to her cousin Ebenezer’s, that I shall be rid of her!” It was a sweet thought to me, and I smiled as I thought it. But alas! as the poet well observes, “How little we know what is ahead of us.” Thinks’es I, as I turned the screw and let the water outen the side of the house to wash me, (Johnothan Beans’es ex-wife had showed me how the night before,) I must do all I can this day in the cause of Right. If I get that destracted here that I am threatened with luny, and have to leave before my time comes, I will go where duty calls me first and most. I should have been glad to have looked round the village, and got acquainted with some of Miss Aster’ses neighbors, but though I felt that the neighborin’ wimmen might think I was real uppish and proud sperited, still I felt that I could better stand this importation than to desert the cause of Right for ½ a minute. I felt that Horace, although nearly perfect in every other respect, needed Josiah Allen’s wife’s influence on a subject dear to that female’s heart. And I felt that that deluded Miss Woodhull needed a true and pure principled female to show her plainly where she stood. Then I laid out to go to Isabella Beecher Hooker’ses. And the time was short, I knew with every fresh roar of destraction that come up from the street below, that the time of my stay in that village was short.